dayton is not in ohio

Here’s a turkey leg I made for a demonstration today in the class I TA for. I don’t make much in this vein, so it was fun and turned out surprisingly well. Sorry for another bad camera-phone shot. I sewed a waste mold from plastic sheeting for the main shape, and cast it in plaster. Then I carved it a bit, made the “shake n bake” coating from beeswax and sawdust, and stained the bone with old coffee. Yummeee. One of my students said that it appeared to be coated in vomit. That’s a freshman for you.

The nature of my work is such that I often get passed over for small group shows that it seems my friends are always being included in… My stuff is generally too big, too involved to install, too serious…

My latest project is none of the above… and I’m going to be in a show!

The concept comes out of a project I abandoned last year, where I began to edit, with a red pen, a printed manuscript of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I had no real goal in mind to begin with, other than having my way with a work that was considered a part of the cannon of Western literature. I started with random annotations and edits until, about eight pages in, I began to turn the novel into a pirate story. This was fun, but the book is far too long to sustain this, and it had become conceptually unmoored. I liked it, but I gave it up as unmanageable.

Then, last month, I was chatting with my friend Wayne Adams, a New York artist I met through CIVA, and he told me of his desire to curate a show all about pirates. I mentioned my old project, and told him I’d like to revisit it, but use a short story rather than a novel. This time I would set out to write a pirate story, giving the project focus.

I began to search short stories in the public domain, and settled on Anton Chekhov’s The Lottery Ticket. The moment I began, I knew I was in love with this project. I love writing, but have never been able to write narratives for some reason. I’ve tried, but I don’t get far. It’s just not in me. Using the narrative framework already in place, the psychological architecture, the character development, I was rolling. I changed names and settings, embellished descriptions, and thoroughly enjoyed laying my own (in this case tragic) swashbuckling veneer on the story. Can’t say that it is good, but it was fun to do.
One of my beloved, astute grad advisers was positive about the project and pointed out (I’m embarrassed to say I had not made the rhetorical connection myself) that what I was doing was pirating. Here I was, a literary pirate, writing about pirates, as if from some intellectual arm’s length. I am a pirate, pillaging Chekhov’s narrative.

So, for the show, which opens this Saturday at Alogon Gallery, an experimental space run and lived in by friends of mine, I will be showing the four pages of the inkjet printed manuscript that I have liberally modified with my trusty red pen. Here’s a horrible cell phone image:

There’s a beautiful appropriateness to the blood-red edits covering the page.

I then typed up my pirated version, doing a little more tweaking in the process. If you’d like to read my pirated version The Wreck of the Revenge, you can download the PDF. You may read Chekhov’s original here.

I plan, finally, to have copies of my story printed, with pirated illustrations, in an edition of small hardcovers. Finally, a small, discreet artistic commodity to hawk. I’ll let you know when they go on sale. Let me know if you’re interested and you may be offered friend pricing…

I also intend to continue pirating short stories. Arrrrgh!

In the background are big canvases being prepped for painting… I haven’t painted in years…

Here’s a short video of a small model I made to work out some of the mechanics of the hitting machine. It’s made of wood, metal tubing, a spring salvaged from an old typewriter (is that redundant?), and a motor.

These are some images of one of my current projects. Almost all of my work right now is dealing with cheating and failure in professional baseball. This is a machine that will hit baseballs. I have a couple of weeks of work left on this. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to hit the balls at.

Digital Model

Crank arm and axle

Axle detail

Crank arm detail

I’m pretty sure that of the ten or so people who occasionally visit this blog, maybe two or three are in Philly. And of those, there’s pretty much no chance that they don’t visit Rob Matthew’s blog more. It’s more of a… real blog. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that there’s basically no chance that anyone in Philly (those that might be able to attend) who reads this post doesn’t already know about Rob’s show at Gallery Joe. It’s still cool.